About

Biawak Panjat Pagar (Eng. Monitor Lizard On The Fence) refers to a photo of a monitor lizard climbing up the fence of Malaysian man Long Cherng Yee. The image became a popular exploitable on Southeast Asian social media in July of 2019.

Origin

On July 4th, 2019, Facebook^[1] user Long Cherng Yee uploaded a photo of himself in front of his house with a monitor lizard climbing his fence. The post received more than 2,400 reactions and 3,600 shares in four years (shown below).

Spread

On July 4th, 2019, a few hours after the original post, Twitter^[6] user @nyombek uploaded similar photos to Yee's but from different angles, captioning the post, "Excuse me, sir. Do you have time to talk about our lord and savior, Godzilla???" The tweet received more than 314,000 likes and 141,700 retweets in four years (shown below).

Over the course of the month, the photo became an exploitable meme template among Malaysian and Indonesian speakers on Twitter. For example on July 4th, 2019, Twitter^[2] user @teslamanaf uploaded the photo captioned, "MISI IBU KAMI DARI DINAS PENYULUHAN DBD MAU JUAL ABATE!!" (Eng. excuse me ma'am, we are from DBD counseling public civil servant want to sell abate), depicting the monitor lizard as the public civil servant. The tweet received more than 4,800 likes and 5,800 retweets (shown below, left). On July 6th, 2019, the Grab Indonesia Twitter^[5] account uploaded an edit to promote its services. The tweet received more than 3,300 likes and 2,700 retweets (shown below, right).

On July 5th, 2019, Twitter user @lilkoostar (previously named @vanccas_) uploaded a compilation of monitor lizard edits from another user. The tweet received more than 11,000 likes and 4,200 retweets in one day before it was deleted. Several media such as Liputan6 ^[3], and Kumparan ^[4] published articles about it (shown below, left, center, and right).

Various Examples

Template

Search Interest

External References